What I've Learned: Alan Arkin

Improvisation has been crucial to my whole life; it's what we're doing all the time.

What I've learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means "to pull from." Education does not mean jamming information into somebody's head. Rather, it's that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.

During the McCarthy era, there was a huge dichotomy in the country. Elvis was the big thing. It was just kind of mindless euphoria on the one hand, and on the other hand, people were living in fear for their lives -- in fear of total annihilation. It was very schizophrenic.

Today there's still a great element of fear, but I don't think anybody's having a very good time.

I'm not a political analyst, but what I see is a sort of worldwide paranoia. Everybody knows: The. Jig. Is. Up. Nature is pissed off and everybody's waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. Everybody knows it. Nobody's free from that fear.

No matter what you do or where you are, you're going to be missing out on something.

Hollywood is a strange place. The class structure here is more rigid than almost anyplace I've ever experienced. It's made more difficult by the fact that it's constantly changing. You never know what class you belong to unless you're one of the two or three people that have been in the same echelon for a long, long time.

If you're looking outside yourself for substantiation of your own happiness, you're going to fail.

Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.

Children learn from what you are rather than what you tell them. What you try to jam into their heads isn't going to be worth beans if the way you're living your life doesn't look like that.

I used to have a lot of philosophies of acting; they all fell apart over the years.

Anything you're rigid about, sooner or later, the rug is going to get pulled out from under you.

We don't have a lot of rules in our house, but I do have one: I'm good for one minute of hair talk. When she asks me, "How does my hair look?" the timer goes on.

Actors are not as interesting as I used to think they were.

There have been times I wished that I had goals that didn't require other people giving me stuff.

I don't know if acting was a calling for me. I feel like it came out of a lot of emotional needs -- the same old actor bullshit: I need attention. I need love. Blah, blah, blah. And the truth is, being an actor doesn't help with that at all. The approval's not really the kind of approval you need, anyway. What someone like that needs is one-on-one, personal caring. The anonymity of show-business caring doesn't help. Like my manager tells me all the time: "They love you." Finally I said, "I don't want to hear that word anymore. They don't love me. Maybe they like my work a little bit. But they don't love me. They don't even know me. If they never saw me again, it wouldn't make any difference. If we were both drowning, they would shove me under to get on the raft."

It took a long conversation to convince the people that I was right for Little Miss Sunshine. They were thinking of somebody, I think, about ten or fifteen years older than I was. They thought I was a little virile. Well, virile was the word they used.

I read somewhere that some people believe that the entire universe is a matrix of living thought. And I said, "Man, if that's not a definition of God, I don't know what is."

Truth is always unfolding. It's not an absolute.

Medicine? Oh, Jesus. Can we not talk about that?

As you get older, you have to change your view of what your life is. Your physiology is going to demand certain things of you, and you either have to pay attention to it or die. I'm on regimens now -- there are things I have to do. If you surrender to it, there's a certain peace you can achieve, rather than saying, "I gotta be the way I was."

I recite the Robert Browning poem to myself all the time. You know the quote? "Grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be,/The last of life, for which the first was made." I'm praying it's going to be true.

Mike SagerMike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter who's been a contributor to Esquire for thirty years.

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